John Dowd described his experience of learning from other universities: So I started going with Nick and with other faculty members to different universities that were doing this. Texas A&M, for example was one. Also, we went to a couple of meetings at Arizona State. We also went to hear an expert in interactive learning give a typical teacher seminar. And then I started planning the curriculum and also the layout of the room. We did everything, from what equipment to buy to the nuts and bolts.

Another important process in which they engaged with significant help from colleagues across the nation was to select the curriculum that would constitute the backbone of IMPULSE. While the UMD faculty were "reform-ready," they did not have the expertise needed to design an 11-unit curriculum based on active learning methods. They sought assistance from Dr. Priscilla Laws at Dickinson College, and Dr. David Sokoloff at the University of Oregon, leading national experts who helped develop Real-Time/Workshop Physics⁴ and microcomputer-based laboratory materials that are designed to promote inquiry-based learning in physics. One of the IMPULSE faculty, John Dowd (physics), explained how they first linked up with the leaders of Workshop Physics:

I was trying to figure out what to do. Do you sit down and invent something, or do you look around and see what other people are doing? My expertise is in chasing physics particles. I had no particular expertise in this [matter of active learning]. So I went to one of the Chautauqua NSF workshops at the University of Oregon, taught by David Sokoloff and Priscilla Laws. I went there particularly because I had read about what these people were doing.ii The next year, both Renate, who was at that time a relatively new faculty member, and I went to a follow-up workshop with Priscilla Laws at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. So we had pretty good idea of what this is approach is capable of doing.

I decided to adopt Priscilla's Workshop Physics as a basis for our course. Within our particle physics research group, one of our collaborating institutions is Rensselaer Polytech and one of our collaborators there taught in the RPI studio course. So a couple years before we instituted IMPULSE, Nick and I and two or three other people got the school van and went out there and spent a day at RPI looking at Studio Physics.

The faculty participants also committed substantial time to learning from external experts and then talking with each other and working out the integration of topics.

Bob Kowalczyk (mathematics) explained: It probably took about two years of preparation. We visited all these other schools to see what they were doing, to see what the idea of teaming is. They have this whole philosophy of teams and cooperative learning. We went to workshops with Johnson and Johnson, and with P.K. Imbrie at Texas A&M. He's very good at this and did a lot of teaming workshops for us.

Then we had to sit down with a physicist and determine how we were going to integrate calculus with physics. For example, in the standard calculus program, engineering students take calculus in the first semester, and physics the second semester, so they've had differentiation, integration and more. In the IMPULSE program they're taking physics at the same time they are taking Calculus 1.

Choosing the studio classroom design and deciding how many students each room should accommodate were also critical factors in the planning stages of IMPULSE. The faculty had to decide among several models, from one designed for 12 to 16 students (like the one Priscilla Laws uses at Dickenson College) to one for over 100 students resembling a large lecture hall (like the one used at Texas A&M). John Dowd (physics) explained that the factors important to him in choosing a classroom design were that it (1) promotes cooperative interaction and group dynamics among the students and (2) was feasible to implement in UMD's environment. They decided on a room that accommodates 48 students (more than their old labs, but fewer than their lecture halls), and that has big tables around with student groups sit. This size optimized a number of factors. Nick explained that they could tell administrators, faculty and potential funding agencies that, in spite of a large initial investment, the program offers savings in the long run, as Dr. Wilson at RPI had demonstrated:

Jack Wilson at RPI started building this idea of the studio physics program. He discovered that it would actually be cheaper to deliver instruction that way, so they piloted it. I'm not sure that they did it all at one time because it's pretty expensive to build all this stuff. They discovered that the students responded, they did the work, and liked it better.